Monday, June 16

I slept deeply, and I don’t think I woke once in the night. At 7:30 I woke in the middle of a dream in which I was trying to get a copy of Wordperfect, written in Finnish, to work properly for Fred. I was trying to recode parts of it by using the manuals. I blame the cat, who wanted to go out.

I let Sunshine out and went back to bed, but nobody needed me to fix old wordprocessors anymore, so I woke up again. Naa got up at 8:20 and we had breakfast together, before she went out to the fields to start her first day of summer work.

I went to the sauna house to set up my work space. I got everything working, with all the cords sensibly wrapped round table legs so people staggering in to brush their teeth wouldn’t have to risk destroying anything. The weather was windy, so the door was closed and about 10:30 I heard Sunshine making a noise outside. It had come to find me to let it into the house.

At 11:00 I sat with Naa while she had her morning snack. Then I went back and moved all my writing from Liquid Story Binder to the new 1.7 version of Scrivener. This was useful for several reasons, not the least of which was that it made me look through the structure of what I have written so far.

By 12:34 I could see what I had done and what I had to do. What I have done so far is better than I feared. What I still have to do seems like I should be able to do it within the allotted time. The whole argument looks as though it will have benefitted from the various enforced pauses, as I have thought and let ideas settle into their proper places.

Now I am on the 13:00 ferry to the shop at Tirmo. Naa is back working in the field, and the ferry has been delayed for at least five minutes by a tug towing a barge containing a bulldozer and a crane. The tug is finally crossing in front of the ferry now.

I will buy things for tonight and tomorrow’s dinner, as well as some juice for Naa, and then return to continue working through the current draft of my thesis. I will not be unhappy. There will be things to add, and a few things to rearrange but, for the first time, the overall structure will stand. The wind will rise and Sunshine will come knocking at my door again, asking to be let into the house.

It will turn out that Sunshine knows a thing or two. At 16:20 it will start raining very heavily, and the temperature will drop noticeably within minutes. Naa will race in with the scrubbed potatoes and I will start cooking them in the sudden darkness.